{"id":18639,"date":"2026-08-29T15:00:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T19:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=18639"},"modified":"2026-08-28T19:34:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T23:34:47","slug":"three-hundred-megawatts-died-ten-miles-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/three-hundred-megawatts-died-ten-miles-away\/","title":{"rendered":"3,100 solar panels now float on the reservoir where 35,000 Ohioans get their drinking water, on four acres instead of the ten the same output needs on land, and the mayor who proposed it in 2019 retired two years later without seeing a single float go in"},"content":{"rendered":"

Solar developers in the Midwest usually lose their fights at the township level. Neighbors show up, trustees pass a resolution, and the project dies long before anyone pours concrete. Ten miles southwest of Lima, Ohio, that is what finished Birch Solar 1, a 300-megawatt farm planned for 1,410 acres of cropland. The Ohio Power Siting Board<\/a> denied it on October 20, 2022, the first time the board had ever rejected a utility-scale solar application.<\/p>\n

Lima watched that from up the road. On August 12, 2026, the city energized 2 megawatts of solar panels floating on four acres of Twin Lake Reservoir, which is where its 35,000 residents get their drinking water. No county resolution, no siting case, no hearing.<\/p>\n

The array powers the water treatment plant next door, a building that runs pumps and filters around the clock and pushes about 14 million gallons a day. That plant burns more electricity than anything else the city owns.<\/p>\n

Lima is better known for other industry. The Cenovus refinery on the north side of town processes around 183,000 barrels a day, and the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, government-owned and run by General Dynamics Land Systems, is the only plant in the United States that builds M1 Abrams tanks.<\/p>\n

Four acres of water did the job of ten acres of ground<\/h2>\n

More than 3,100 bifacial panels sit on Ciel & Terre Hydrelio floats, tied to anchors on the reservoir bed and its banks. Power runs ashore to eight Yaskawa Solectria XGI inverters. Rain does not bother any of it, and Ohio had plenty of rain the week the array came online. The mooring lines let the whole thing ride up and down with the water level.<\/p>\n

Other towns will copy the land math. A 2-megawatt ground-mounted system needs at least 10 acres once you allow for row spacing and service access, and the floating version covers 4 acres of surface. D3Energy, the Florida developer behind it, has now built all three of Ohio’s floating arrays, with contractor ARP Solar doing the construction on each one.<\/p>\n

“By building on water the city already owns, Lima is generating 2 MW of clean power while preserving nearly 10 acres,” D3Energy managing director Stetson Tchividjian told Solar Power World<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Nameplate<\/div>\n
2 MW<\/div>\n
More than 3,100 bifacial panels on Twin Lake Reservoir, Lima, Ohio.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Footprint<\/div>\n
4 vs 10 acres<\/div>\n
Water surface used, against the ground the same output would need.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Project cost<\/div>\n
$5 million<\/div>\n
A $2.4M Department of Energy grant and close to $900,000 in direct pay credits covered about half.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
PROJECTED<\/div>\n
Savings<\/div>\n
$200,000<\/div>\n
City estimate for year one, and $10 million across a 15 to 20 year life.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Washington covered about half the bill<\/h2>\n

Lima put in roughly $2 million of its own money on a project the developer prices at $5 million. A $2.4 million Department of Energy grant covered the largest share, money that then-U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown helped secure. Close to $900,000 more came through the Inflation Reduction Act’s direct pay provision, which lets a city with no federal tax bill collect the investment tax credit as cash.<\/p>\n

Mayor Sharetta Smith has said the project would not have been possible without that provision. Running the water plant costs Lima about $1 million a year.<\/p>\n

Utilities director Michael Caprella puts first-year savings around $200,000 and lifetime savings near $10 million across an expected 15 to 20 years, he told The Lima News<\/a>. Twenty years at $200,000 comes to $4 million. Closing the gap to $10 million assumes Ohio electricity keeps getting more expensive. That is a forecast.<\/p>\n

Any town trying this now faces a harder clock. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, ends the Section 48E investment credit for solar placed in service after December 31, 2027, unless construction began before July 5, 2026. That construction deadline passed six weeks before Lima flipped the switch. Direct pay itself survived the law, but it only pays out whatever the underlying credit is worth, so a municipal project starting today has until the end of 2027 to be generating.<\/p>\n

Ohio spent five years making land-based solar harder<\/h2>\n

Ohio Senate Bill 52 took effect on October 11, 2021. County commissioners can designate any unincorporated part of a county as a restricted area where large wind and solar are prohibited outright, and the siting board cannot accept an application there. Roughly a third of Ohio’s 88 counties have adopted some restriction. Richland County voters upheld bans across 11 of that county’s 18 townships on May 5, 2026, with just under 53% of the vote.<\/p>\n

Lima’s array never went near any of it. Ohio law defines a “large solar facility” as 50 megawatts or more, and the restricted-area power reaches only unincorporated county land. A 2-megawatt array inside city limits on city-owned water sits outside both tests. That is the whole trick, and it is a boring one.<\/p>\n

Two megawatts does not replace 300.<\/p>\n

Lightsource bp said Birch Solar would have supplied roughly 55,000 homes. Lima’s array covers about 250 homes’ worth of annual electricity, according to WLIO, and offsets around 1,076 US tons of carbon dioxide a year, or 976 metric tons. Lima proved something smaller and more useful. A mid-sized American city can put real generation on infrastructure it already owns and skip four years of hearings to do it.<\/p>\n

Shading a reservoir does something to the algae, and nobody is sure what<\/h2>\n

NREL<\/a> has been making the land-sparing case since 2018, when its researchers estimated that floating panels on more than 24,000 man-made American water bodies could supply about 10% of national electricity generation and spare roughly 5.2 million acres of ground. That same work listed reduced evaporation and reduced algae growth as side benefits, and Lima cites both. We went through NREL’s federal reservoir numbers in more detail when Britain opened its own consultation on covering lakes with panels<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Field data is thinner than the modeling. A team led by Alexander Cagle at UC Davis sampled four American floating solar ponds twice a day across all four seasons and published the results in Frontiers in Water<\/a> in October 2025. Differences in chlorophyll-a, phycocyanin, dissolved oxygen, pH and temperature between shaded water and open water were mostly minimal. One site with 4.8% coverage showed chlorophyll-a down as much as 80% under the panels in spring. A eutrophic site with 22% coverage sometimes ran higher under the panels than out in the open. The authors asked for longer monitoring before anyone banks on the water-quality benefits.<\/p>\n

A separate 2025 study of a shallow drinking water reservoir reported benthic cyanobacteria appearing beneath a floating array, which is the one organism a water utility does not want more of. Lima’s four acres are a small share of Twin Lake, so whatever shading effect exists there will be smaller still. The array started generating on August 12, 2026. Anything measurable at Twin Lake will take seasons.<\/p>\n

Two more Ohio reservoirs are in the same program<\/h2>\n

Del-Co Water finished Ohio’s first floating array in spring 2024, 1.5 megawatts and about 2,600 panels on a pond at its Olentangy Water Treatment Plant in Delaware, offsetting close to half that plant’s electricity. Monroeville, a village in Huron County, has 6 megawatts going in on its own drinking water reservoir, due online before the end of 2026 and rated at more than 7,500 megawatt-hours a year. That one will pass Lima as the largest floating array in the state.<\/p>\n

Ownership separates the three. Gardner Capital owns the Del-Co and Monroeville systems, and the utility and the village buy the power back under long-term agreements. Lima owns its array outright, which is exactly the outcome the direct pay credit was written to make possible.<\/p>\n

Cohoes, New York, a city of about 17,000, went further on a smaller pond, with 5,880 panels and 3.2 megawatts covering most of its 10-acre drinking water reservoir, paid for with $3 million in federal money, state incentives and $750,000 from National Grid.<\/p>\n

The American pattern here is small, municipal and attached to a water plant. Most of the country’s floating solar sits on closed-loop water like this, as we found when a California winery floated 1,000 panels over its irrigation pond<\/a>, and when Arkansas researchers put 96 panels on a rice irrigation reservoir<\/a>.<\/p>\n

David Berger, mayor of Lima for 32 years, took the floating solar idea to Power a Clean Future Ohio in 2019 and retired in 2021 without seeing a single float go in the water. City council authorized the project in 2023, crews drove the first anchors in October 2025, and the array started producing on August 12, 2026, feeding a plant that serves close to 27,000 water accounts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Solar developers in the Midwest usually lose their fights at the township level. Neighbors show up, trustees pass a resolution, … <\/p>\n

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